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I can't help but think back to all the early 90's hype about the "information superhighway" and those commercials by AT&T ("have you ever gotten a haircut while getting your oilchanged, picked up some movie tickets and received a large slurpee from an ATM? You will! And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T"). There were so many things we thought would be ubiquitous today.

computers vs. manual labor (my parents used to tell me as a kid that I needed to know how to use computers, since manufacturing would be entirely computer based in my adulthood - mostly true?)

I really want to write about GM food v. traditional/organically farmed food; but a vast majority of the farmers (world wide) have already moved into GM farming. [GM] Food v. Cancer just doesn't sound right as a chapter heading. Also "traditional farming" is not always "organically grown."

An aside to Jim Cuene's suggestion of New Coke vs. Coke Classic: I was told by my high school AP Government teacher that New Coke is Coke Classic. The Coke people wanted to use cheaper sugar, but it tasted too different to just let it slide, so they called it "New Coke". When people complained about New Coke's taste, they just changed the name to Coke Classic.

I mean, come on, every futurist magazine since the 40's was showing off all the jetpacks, flying cars and levitating whatzits that'd we'd all have in the year 2000, and I don't know about you, but I'm still taking the damn subway.

Seems to me that there is a counter-revolution that goes with every revolution.

Examples: flatscreen vs. CRT, DVD vs. VHS.

When the innovation catches on, the old technology gets way cheaper and in doing so experiences a boom in sales. If I had to buy a new monitor, I could spend $600 on a 15" flatscreen Studio Display in Graphite or $175 on a 19" Sont CRT that doesn't match my G4's color scheme. I remember when displays were $100 an inch.

I think the more interesting question is how new technologies refocus existing technologies. Radio didn't go away when television arrived, but it certainly changed. Do you listen to much radio drama these days?

There is some irony in this. Newspapers were once the place for breaking news -- "the first draft of history." Now that we consume most information through other, instant media, newspapers have become the place where stories are investigated and given depth. What did the papers have left to say on Sept. 12 last year? They had already turned to reflection and analysis.

So I still get regular mail, but email has virtually eliminated the friendly physical letter (except from grandma). And I saw instant messaging almost immediately replace certain emails when I decided to adopt that technology.

Virtually every list above makes me more interested in how the existing thing changed when the new one arrived.

The inventors of things almost never know what their invention is going to be good for. They go into it thinking it will improve something that came before, but in fact, the new invention usually just opens up new possibilities they hadn't considered. The old stuff remains valid for the things it was good for (which probably wasn't what it's inventor intended either), so it stays around.

Brian Eno has talked a lot about this in terms of synthesizers and computerized mixing equipment. Synth designers were always building in presets that supposedly emulated traditional instruments like violins or oboes. These always sounded awful and soon musicians discovered that the best sounds to come out of a synth were the ones that didn't sound like anything else.

Seems as though you have enough ideas to write a pocket book (along the lines of Paranoid's Pocket Guide, but more intellectual). Each page (or so) could be another new invention versus old. I can already see people reading it on the subway.